The nicest looking one I could find was amberol, but that was a bit too minimalistic for me. I like minimal UIs but that doesn't have to translate to minimal feature sets as well.

But in the end I didn't find any simple but hackable players that I liked; in the end I just settled on audacious because it's just simple enough in terms of UI and good enough in terms of features. I do like the playlists as tabs idea though.

Actually sounds like a not so bad setting for a book/game/movie ngl; sure sounds like a garbage setting for a world to actually live in.

But meh, it's a broader issue anyway. Just look at the puritanical obsession some people have with pornography too.

Young people these days are getting infantilised way too much imho and that's just not healthy. There needs to be a safe environment to transition into adulthood with gradual exposure to all kinds of things, rather than turning 18 and suddenly being a different category of person entirely.

Can't imagine someone incapable of building a website would deliver a good (digital) product.

In other words, now that people have had a taste of it and know what they're actually consenting to, companies should have to get renewed consent (positive consent, that is) instead of relying on "you agreed to this before it was even a real thing".

It kind of comes down to the you can't put a "you sell your soul" clause in the terms and conditions of a coffee subscription service mentality: at what point do you simply say "this is obviously in bad faith" and declare it void rather than just say "it's silly, but you signed it".

And I think there's massive cultural differences regarding where that line is drawn.

Ultimately us random people on the internet can't say if China would want that or could be convinced with some other concessions unrelated to AI, but what we can say for sure is that, if China has the will to chill, the west has the negotiating power to match them.

This is super simple to enforce.

For starters, we only really care about the companies developing big commercial AI products, not the people running said models on their home PCs or anything along those lines.

If a company starts offering a new AI model commercially, you simply send someone to audit it and make sure they can provide proof of consent, have their input data, etc.

In most cases, this should be enough. If there's reason to believe an AI company is actually straight up lying to the authorities, you simply have them re-train their model in a controlled environment.

Oh and no, you don't need cryptographically secure random numbers for AI training and/or operation, so you can easily just save your random seeds along with the input data for perfectly reproducible results.

This isn't an enforcement problem, it's a lobbying problem. Lawmakers are convinced that AI will solve their problems for them when reality is that it's still mostly speculation on someone at some point finding a way to make it profitable.

In reality, training and even running AI is still way too expensive to the companies selling them, even without considering the long-term economic impact of the harmful ways they are trained (artists contribute to GDP directly, open source projects do so indirectly, and free services like wikipedia are an important part of modern society; AI is causing massive costs to all of these)

So in practice, no, it shouldn't. Not because that information itself is bad, but because it probably isn't limited to just that answer.

In summary, I think it is definitely a problem when:

1. The model is trained on a certain type of intellectual property 2. The model is then asked to produce content of the same type 3. The authors of the training data did not consent

And slightly less so, but still questionable when instead:

2. The IP becomes an integral part of the new product

which, arguably, is the case for any and all AI training data; individually you could take any of them out and not much would happen, but remove them all and the entire product is gone.

Again, I think we should require companies to get the user to actively give their consent to these things. Platforms are free to lock or terminate accounts that don't, but they shouldn't be allowed to steal content because someone didn't read an e-mail.

That is, be able to prove a) that their models were actually trained on the data they claim, b) that they have consent to use said data for AI training, and c) that this consent was given by the actual author or with the author's consent.

I want platforms like soundcloud, youtube, etc. to be required to actually send out an e-mail to all of its users "hey we will be using your content for AI training, please click here to give permission".

That "disproportionate" competition from minorities you are noticing now is an attempt at artificially offsetting a lack of competition from those minorities that might have allowed you to even get to that place in the first place.

Does this suck? I'm sure it does. But it's not as unfair as you're portraying it. And while dressing your complaints up in fancy words like "meritocracy" or "excellence", the core of what you're saying is still just that nothing should be done to correct injustices that have already taken place.

To use a metaphor: Someone gifted you $10k and now the police is telling you that was from a bank robbery, and you don't want to give it back.

And as for outcomes: the assumption with this strategy is that minorities aren't inherently inferior, and therefore excluding them from the talent pool is anti-meritocratic in the long term. Partially suspending meritocracy to correct these demographic problems is a strategy to, in the long term, gain access to as many talented individuals as possible, so that universities can really pick the best, and not just the best among white men.

So it's fairness + long term efficiency vs. short term meritocracy

Universities are picking the first option. And why wouldn't they: they can do the right thing and gain accent to a larger talent pool. None of this is a "social narrative"; it's all just very simple decisions based on what we know reality to look like.

I think the problem has more to do with the inflationary process of universities turning into glorified trade schools and more of more jobs requiring a degree as a proxy for effort and social status rather than because of any actual skills one needs a university to develop.

In a world where everyone needs a degree, universities will streamline the process of producing degree-holding workers, and the inevitable cost will be their ability to produce "excellence", in any meaningful sense. If you don't like this, the solution is to strengthen "lesser" forms of education, so they are enough to qualify people for jobs. Then Universities will go back to being places where people pursue science and inovation rather than a 9-5

But this isn't true though; China wants a one-sided reunification at all costs and would prefer if it was peaceful.

Fun fact: All countries that invade others would generally have preferred a peaceful takeover if that had been an option. It's not like Nazi Germany would have complained if Poland had just willingly decided to join the Reich.

What would you think about someone who told you, unironically, "Nazi Germany wanted a peaceful unification with Poland"? Surely you'd think it's silly to even attempt to bring that up like it's an actual argument, right?

So no, China wants to annex Taiwan. That is how you fully describe China's position on the subject.

As for the DPP vs KMT thing, you bring that up as if the KMT was in favour of re-unification; their position is really more about not upsetting China and risk an invasion. It is a different approach to maintaining independence, but that is still the goal.

If you really had a problem with treating taiwan as a pawn of the west, why aren't you instead complaining that we don't recognise Taiwan as its own nation separate from the ROC?

Most "competition" in our modern world is artificial. Try figuring out who benefits from it and where this mentality originates. You'll find that those two tend to overlap :)

It's a miserable life though; for one, not everyone even has a romantic partner, and even for those who do, being 100% dependent on one person is incredibly toxic.

So yea, while being friendless might not kill you, realistically, adults need friends.

> In my life and in the life of people that I observe regularly, there is no real need for friends.

My condolences. I hope one day you find people that you can actually connect with and care about each other.

People would be willing to pay so much more if what they were paying for was the friendship instead, but so far, any attempt at taking friendships hostage and having people pay have gone nowhere.

So the logical conclusion is to just sell the friendships immediately; that way you can put a price tag directly on the friendship itself and earn much more money from it.

This is a perfectly reasonable business strategy when you're a soulless psychopath with an insatiable hunger for endless wealth.

Sounds like the problem is not the crawling itself but downloading multimedia files.

The article also explains that these requests are much more likely to request resources that aren't cached, so they generate more expensive traffic.